Conventional methods for planting a field of plants, such as blueberry plants and the like, involve slowly hauling a load of trees across the field with a tractor as a team of workers follow closely behind the tractor. The tractor stops periodically as workers manually pick up individual trees, roughen their root balls, and plant them in the ground in rows. As can be appreciated, the process of manually planting trees is labor-intensive and requires a large number of monotonous man-hours for completion.
At harvest, mechanized harvesting equipment is operated to move along the rows of trees to remove their crops. The total amount of the crop that can be harvested using such equipment depends in part upon the alignment of the trees in their respective rows. Because a high degree of precision often cannot be achieved in aligning the trees in rows by manual planting, a minimum amount of crop loss typically can be expected during harvesting. For example, about a 10 to 20% crop loss usually occurs in harvesting the crop of a blueberry field established using manual planting methods.
Hence, a need exists for new and improved apparatus and methods for planting trees.